


Quantum Entanglement (The Science of Us)

by grapehyasynth



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Drabbles, F/M, Science
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-18
Updated: 2016-09-09
Packaged: 2018-07-24 16:56:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7515944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grapehyasynth/pseuds/grapehyasynth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Separate from my regular drabbles, I’m starting a Fitzsimmons drabble series inspired by the chemistry textbook I’m reading for fun this summer (don’t worry, my mom – a biology teacher – already told me I’m crazy).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
>  
> 
> I literally can't handle the graphic omgfitzsimmons made for this collection??? HOW AMAZING IS THIS?? <3

At first, Fitz entirely misunderstands Jemma’s excitement when they meet Trip. She has to explain several times – for Trip’s sake, as Fitz has learned to comprehend her bubbly babble on the first go – that he shares a first name with Antoine Lavoisier, sometimes called the father of modern chemistry and one of Jemma’s personal heroes.

“He’s a complicated figure, as he was an aristocrat and collected taxes which made him unpopular during the French Revolution and he married his wife when he was 28 and she was 13, and some would contend that a great deal of his advancements were only made possible through the previous work of other, more significant scientists, but really, considering that he improved our understanding of combustion and the theory of the conservation of mass and that he named oxygen and hydrogen – It’s quite an important name to carry, Agent Triplett.”

Trip laughs, not following most of what she’s saying, and makes some flirty, nonsensical joke about “gettin’ some chemistry brewin’ between us, girl” before he strolls away.

Some weeks later, they learn of Trip’s grandfather, a Howling Commando, and Jemma gushes that, again like Lavoisier, that makes him practically royalty. Fitz grumbles that a grandda who was part of a group of stupidly heroic strongarms is a bit different than coming from a long line of wealthy, influential families. Jemma tells him to hush and says she prefers Trip’s type of prestige anyway.

Jemma doesn’t think of the connection again until she’s watching shards of Trip being wheeled past her in Puerto Rico and she’s trying not to vomit inside her hazmat suit. She’d forgotten, in her initial enthusiasm, how Lavoisier’s story ended, with the aristocrat guillotined in Revolutionary France at the height of his career.

Two bright lives snuffed too soon by violent, earth-changing forces beyond their control.


	2. Does it burn when exposed to air

Jemma never found it particularly necessary to understand the people around her. Her parents tried again and again to coax her to ask personal questions (and actually listen to the answers), to attend birthday parties, and to play the kinds of games the other girls giggled over during lunch or at slumber parties. “It’ll be helpful,” they insisted, “even if you do end up in a lab. It’s important to be able to relate to other people.”

But she never found anyone interesting enough to warrant devoting the time and energy necessary for developing a finesse for human interaction. Those who provided something she needed could be persuaded (or pestered) into helping her; those who didn’t find her company enjoyable could sod off.

Fitz was different. At the start, it was their similarities that comforted Jemma – the ease with which he fit into her life and her patterns – and so she still didn’t need to learn to decipher people, because she and Fitz spoke the same language, or often didn’t need to speak at all.

Somewhere along their hurtling path through space and time –  and Jemma was never sure if it happened gradually or all at once – she finally saw Fitz with clarity: as an individual element, the most vital and fascinating building block of her universe. All the time she’d spent avoiding getting to know people and their complexities and complications and messy emotions… she suddenly wished she had that time back so that she could meet Fitz again and do so much differently – do it right.

Not knowing what parameters were appropriate, she fell back to the ones she trusted. She analyzed his chemical and physical properties with ardent interest. When identifying an element, she, as any good chemist, would consider questions such as “Does it burn when it exposed to oxygen? Does it decompose upon heating? Does it rust or corrode?”

It was an imprecise translation from science to human. Fitz certainly sometimes burned in the air, or exploded with violent and fiery rage, but that was not a chemical property she could reliably notate. Because just as often, his warmth would incite growth and healing instead of destruction. And just as often, oxygen would burn him.

His toxicity, too, was variable. Towards others, towards those he deemed bad people, he could be withering and acerbic and poisonous. In the darker times of their relationship, after Hydra, after Will, one pleading look from him could paralyze her insides, leave every cell in her body wrecked. But that had more to do with the way their two elements interacted than with his toxicity alone. Because when times were good, or often even when they weren’t,  he could brush a thumb across her trembling lower lip and give her new life.

Under no condition did he decompose, rust, corrode, disintegrate. And she had seen him in every condition. This unchangeable durability she would classify as scientifically impossible had she not seen with her own eyes the absolute refusal of his body and his spirit to erode under the unstoppable onslaught he – they – perpetually faced.

She couldn’t classify him as she wanted to – couldn’t analyze him into a square on a periodic table. Even the hollows of his cheeks or the scent of his breath was different every day. He existed in so many states and so many isotopes and she wanted to know them all – not to use them, not to move her own life or work forward, but to know them, to know every inch and iteration of Fitz purely for knowledge’s sake.

It was a heady addiction, this pursuit of understanding, but one day, in a heated moment, she drew back from his arms and found him studying her with the same intensity.

She was his unsolvable puzzle, and he was hers. And for the first time, Jemma understood what was meant when people said that sometimes it was the process, not the solution, that really mattered.


	3. Chapter 3

Jemma knows better than to try to ascribe scientific laws to non-scientific interactions the way that foolish lay people usually do. After all, if “opposites attract” were truly applicable to human relationships, she and Fitz would be doomed.

But in her endless night spent wandering and scrabbling for survival on Maveth, she has an abundance of time to try to put their connection, their friendship, into terms her brain can accept.

In the early days, she clings to the notion that scientific law, though practically her bread and butter and her Bible and her lifeblood and every other metaphor encapsulating how strongly she upholds it, is not fixed and unchangeable. Human understanding of nature and reality is fallible.

So when Newton asserted that “Every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle with a force that is directly proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them,” he clearly did not expect the strength and determination of the particles of matter which make up Doctor Doctor Agent Jemma Simmons. Her mass may be small, the distance between her and Fitz and _home_ may be great, but the attraction, the pull, the incessant drive to return, is as powerful as ever.

When she notices (with a whole-body ache and a sob) that attraction’s inevitable waning, she analyzes that too. Is it due to the mass she has lost through starvation and exertion? Is it the distance – is this hellplanet drifting orbit-less through space, taking her ever farther away from Fitz? Or has their connection finally been broken? Have they actually always been subject to the same laws governing everyone else, and she is now too far away to draw them back together?

But the particles that make up Leopold Fitz must be made of similarly stubborn, universe-defying stuff, she realizes when their fingers brush and brush and brush and hold in a dust storm.

Isaac Newton can suck it.

(She draws the line at believing that the cosmos itself is directing their relationship. Shoddily translating science to humanity is one thing, but anthropomorphizing inanimate intangibles is too far, _Fitz_.)

Months later and a lifetime away, she has to smile when Fitz speaks of the singularity. He describes the monumental nature of their having sex as if they are a star tumbling into a black hole and she is reminded again how well they are matched. For she has likewise been analyzing their situation with science, though she has chosen a less terrifying and more hopeful comparison.

Sex, making love, crossing the event horizon – that is nothing if not a chemical reaction, the ultimate collision of their disparate, desperate elements. But a chemical reaction does not obliterate. “Certain combinations of atoms transform into new combinations of atoms.” This change will not be an ending for them, no matter what happens. Their friendship will not be lost because they cannot be destroyed. In colliding, in joining, they will simply become something new.

Who ever said science wasn’t sexy?


	4. Chapter 4

In his massive first-century BCE poem “De Rerum Natura”, Roman philosopher Lucretius posits the existence of atoms in one of the earliest recorded contemplations of such a concept.

The full poem, the title of which translates to “On the Nature of Things,” is thousands of pages long, so Fitz hasn’t read it in its entirety. (He may be stubborn but he’s not stupid.) But a segment of it was featured in the first chemistry textbook he ever read -- he was seven -- and one section so mesmerized him that he has committed it to memory: “Consider now these further instances/ Of Bodies which you must yourself admit/ Are real things, and yet cannot be seen.”

Fitz traces a bloom of freckles across Jemma’s cheek as she sleeps and thinks again and again and again about that line.  _ Bodies which you must yourself admit are real things and yet cannot be seen _ . His entire life is based on what can be counted and measured, what can be explained with reason and logic. He can count Jemma’s freckles, he can measure her heartbeat, he can use reason and logic to determine whether the red marks on her cheek are from the pillow or his own shoulder, where she had spent most of the night snuggled. But there is something more which he must admit is real and yet he cannot see, cannot count or measure or reason.

Magic isn’t real, of that Fitz is certain. But love? Love may be the closest thing to magic Fitz has ever encountered.

It obeys no understandable laws and erupts out of nowhere. Unlike energy and mass, love can be created and destroyed (not  _ their  _ love, of course, but he has seen it happen elsewhere). Science attributes much of what Fitz is experiencing to “brain chemistry” and “genital impulses” but he knows, he  _ knows _ , it’s more than that.

Someday it might be better understood, and Fitz is secretly glad that he’ll likely be dead before they find the answer. As important as it is that all factors of the universe be explained, for the first time in his life he rather likes the mystery.

Jemma mumbles something in her sleep and rolls towards him. She is all knobby knees and jabbing elbows but he absorbs her into his chest as if she were made of the same stuff as the light floating through their bedroom window.

It has been estimated that there are more atoms in a single grain of sand than the estimated number of stars in the universe. By the same token, Fitz realizes with an aching amazement, there are likely more atoms in a single freckle on Jemma’s face than there are stars. For that is the way of things, the Nature of Things: the whole universe before him, and it is still this, still her, still  _ Jemma  _ that astounds and mystifies and enchants him. 


	5. Chapter 5

Water is 11.2% hydrogen and 88.8% oxygen.

And yet somehow, though water is filling Fitz’s lungs, there is no oxygen.

Jemma knows that in salt water there are additional components and that their inability to breathe it has more to do with the fact that air and oxygen are not actually synonymous. It is the former Fitz needs, but there is an abundance of the latter and everyone always says it is oxygen in the bloodstream and oxygen in the lungs and yet – Why can’t she be wrong about the science, just this once? Why can’t the fundamental fabric of the universe tear and defy everything she knows?

Water is 11.2% hydrogen and 88.8% oxygen.

And yet somehow, though the majority of its elemental composition is gaseous, it hurts like a dense solid.

It hits her with more force than should be possible, enough force to momentarily make her forget the plan she formulated in the millisecond before Fitz hit the button. It slams into her chest and stomach and she barely gets the mask over her mouth in time and _isn’t this an oxygen tank_ so why can’t they just breathe the water, the water that is choking Fitz _my best friend in the world yeah and you’re more than that_ right in front of her?

Water is 11.2% hydrogen and 88.8% oxygen.

And yet somehow, for all the ease with which she has been moving through oxygen her whole life, it is now, when it matters most, that it holds her back.

Her fingers ache where they are clenched around Fitz’s collar and she looks at the distant sunlight instead of down to his face, already tinged with blue from oxygen deprivation. Oxygen. _Oxygen. Where the fuck are you??_ Her lungs are burning with the exertion of the swim and the effort of not opening her mouth, not just giving in and letting herself sink with Fitz, letting them drift away to sleep forever in each other’s arms.

Water is 11.2% hydrogen and 88.8% oxygen.

And yet somehow, it is the dry air above the surface, with only 20.95% oxygen, that rips through her throat and reminds her what it is to live.

She gasps and heaves and hauls Fitz to the surface, begging him to let the oxygen in, promising him that here it is different, here it will heal instead of kill. She starts to hold her breath again, afraid she is taking too much of the air, though it stretches for unbroken miles above the unbroken ocean and up to the unbroken sky because _they are so alone_ but if holding her breath means he can have more of the air, she will do it –

Water is 11.2% hydrogen and 88.8% oxygen.

And yet somehow, though by now the tears Jemma has let fall on Fitz’ pillow and still hands and hospital gown must surely account for a small ocean, with oxygen to spare, breathing seems to evade the person before her.

His lungs rise and fall as the machine tells them to, like he rose when she hauled him to the surface, but take the machine away – let her fingers unclench – and he will collapse, he will disappear, the oxygen will fail him again. She _hates_ it, has never hated an element before because what nonsense is that but she hates it and the way it can give life and fire and ignite and inflate and create and combine and still, at the same time, be responsible for the dark bruises under Fitz’s skin and the worry in the doctors’ whispers and the empty place in her heart.


	6. Shining Dawn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's less science-y than some of the others but I saw a little tidbit in the textbook and couldn't resist.

Jemma spends far too much time thinking about [ what sort of ring Fitz will choose ](http://agl03.tumblr.com/post/149622307471/aos-advent-calendar-23-days-to-go) . She doesn’t _need_ to marry him to live blissfully by his side, but ever since they returned from holiday she can’t stop thinking about it, wondering if he’s thinking about it. Every time he leaves for a mission she wonders if he’s in cahoots with Coulson. Even when he returns with a bruise over one eye and a little strut in his walk -- “I took down _two men_ , Jemma -- _two!_ ” -- she’s suspicious.

She knows Fitz will have given it just as much thought. He’s too considerate, that man, and he loves symbolism and sweeping gestures and just generally outdoing even the heroes of the romance epics Daisy sometimes makes them watch. Whatever he chooses will be brilliant, or unique, or somehow a reflection of their relationship. Perhaps he has a family heirloom tucked away for just this occasion? She hasn’t noticed any packages arriving from Glasgow, but she also wouldn’t put it past Fitz to have personally made an overnight trip via jet.

Of course she can’t _ask_ , as much as she’s itching too, as much as her gaze keeps drifting to his sock drawer and his cabinet in the lab. She certainly doesn’t care about the tradition of the surprise but Fitz would be indignant. So she tries to forget about it.

When he finally does it, they’ve just completed a nighttime hike -- for fun, surprisingly, not for a mission -- and she glances over at him to see how he looks lit by the first glow of sunrise and there he is on one knee. At the end of his ridiculously poetic speech, during which she fails utterly at not crying, he pulls out a simple gold band.

A touch of disappointment must flash across her face because he catches her fingertips and murmurs, “Jemma, what’s the symbol for gold?”

She rolls her eyes. If he tries to make some ridiculous periodic table pick-up line _now_ \-- “Au, of course.”

“And why is it Au?”

“For aurum, which has various translations from Latin, including gold, glow, and...” She stutters to a stop and inhales sharply, clapping a hand to her mouth.

“Shining dawn,” he finishes for her. His hand trembles as he stands and slides the ring onto her finger. “I thought that phrase had some significance for us. Not just in terms of sunrises--” He gestures out to the tip of the sun, just visible on the horizon. “But also for the metaphor, for new beginnings and for how dependable dawn is. It’s different every day but it’s always there.”

She flings her arms around his neck and tries to form coherent words but she’s just blubbering against his cheek.

“I can make something fancier for the wedding--” he mumbles.

  
“Shut up,” she whispers, and she kisses him, this man who sees her as his sun when it is clearly the other way around: the world, the entire galaxy, orbits around him.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on Tumblr!


End file.
